Monthly Archives: March 2018

  • My Days of Mercy

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Tali Shalom Ezer (2017)

    My Days of Mercy, which opened this year’s LGBTQ+ festival at BFI, is an attraction-of-opposites love story.  The opposites are morose, awkward, lank-haired Lucy (Ellen Page) and fragrant, blonde, self-assured Mercy (Kate Mara).  Lucy, from a working-class family in small-town Ohio, is out of work.  Mercy is a lawyer in Chicago.  They first see each other on literally opposing sides of an argument:  both are among demonstrators outside a Kentucky prison where an execution is shortly to take place.  Lucy Moro, her elder sister Martha (Amy Seimetz) and younger brother Benjamin (Charlie Shotwell) are there as part of the anti-capital punishment lobby.  Mercy is accompanying her mother (Denise Dal Vara) and father (Kevin Crowley) – a senior police officer and leading light in a survivors-of-homicide group for whom the death sentence means necessary justice.  Every so often in the film, a plate of food, representing the last meal of a condemned man (it is always a man), appears on the right-hand side of the screen.  On the left-hand side, text summarises the prisoner’s crime and Death Row location.  The quasi-documentary flavour of this motif is misleading.  In spite of My Days of Mercy’s purportedly ‘challenging’ themes, it uses the death penalty debate in America as no more than grist to the (melo)dramatic mill.

    Whereas legal execution still operates today in thirty-one US states, the film’s director Tali Shalom Ezer is from Israel, which, since the founding of the modern state, has never had a system of capital punishment[1].  The screenwriter Joe Barton is a Londoner, born (from the look of his photograph and CV online) well after the abolition of the death penalty in Britain.  People of Shalom Ezer’s and Barton’s age and background can hardly be blamed for viewing Death Row America as a remote, antique land of barbarism but it’s objectionable that they assume that, in order fully to engage the audience, the main characters in My Days of Mercy must have a strong personal investment in capital punishment.  The man about to die in Kentucky is the killer of Mercy’s father’s former partner in crime prevention.  (The guilty man, we’re told, has some kind of learning disability:  a bizarrely anxious detail – the film-makers seem worried we might think it was OK for a non-disabled person to be executed.)  It soon emerges too that the Moro siblings’ father Simon (Elias Koteas) is himself on Death Row, for the murder eight years ago of his wife and their mother.

    The lifestyle of Lucy, Martha and Benjamin – driving long journeys to protest impending executions in different states – piques your interest at first because it’s so unusual.  Not for long, though:  it’s soon obviously just a means of ensuring that Lucy and Mercy can-go-on-meeting-like-this.  Although their difference of opinion about capital punishment is set up as a chasm between the protagonists, it doesn’t stop Mercy from promptly making moves to start a relationship between them or Lucy from responding tentatively but positively.  As the film dribbles on, they exchange a few cross words about Death Row issues but these don’t amount to much and the divide seems geographical as much as political.  While Lucy, fourteen when their mother was murdered, has continued to harbour doubts as to their father’s innocence of the crime, her big sister. has always been sure that Simon was wrongly convicted.  Since Martha is also the driving force behind the family’s appearance at Death Row demos, the implication is that the Moro siblings wouldn’t have become involved in this if they’d thought their father had committed murder.  When new DNA tests arranged by their lawyer (Brian Geraghty) point conclusively to Simon’s guilt, Martha’s world falls apart for a couple of screen minutes but she soon gets over it.  By the time Simon is executed, Martha, as well as Laura, behaves as if they’ve always opposed capital punishment in principle and regardless of whether their father is a killer.  By this stage, of course, it’s safe for Shalom Ezer and Barton also to give the impression that they’ve been making a straightforward political statement throughout:  they needn’t worry about the audience getting bored during the grim sequence of Simon’s execution.

    Mercy also attends Simon’s execution to give Lucy moral support but it’s the first time they’ve seen each other in a while.  They break up after Lucy arrives unannounced at Mercy’s parents’ home and interrupts a family dinner where everyone round the table keeps giving the unexpected caller uncomfortable sideways looks:  the diners include Ian (Jake Robinson), the boyfriend that Lucy didn’t know that Mercy had.   Their reunion at Simon Moro’s execution isn’t the reconciliation scene.  That has to wait until the very end of My Days of Mercy, when Mercy turns up in Ohio, at a diner where Lucy has resumed working.  Even someone with as little interest in personal appearance as Lucy must be struck by the red dress that Mercy is now wearing (she’s favoured black or white outfits until now).  Mercy tells Lucy that she’s given up (a) her job and (b) Ian:  (b) means more than (a) because Mercy had one of those screen jobs that don’t appear to involve actually going to work.  At first, Lucy is characteristically annoyed by Mercy’s sudden reappearance but then says they could meet after she’s finished at the diner.  This is the end of the story – or, rather, its stopping point:  there’s nothing to suggest how the central relationship might continue or develop.

    Once it’s clear the Moros’ Death Row travels are no more than a plot device, you occasionally wonder if this thin and shallow film might be more interesting if Mercy, rather than Lucy, were the main character – even though you know from the weakly punning title that won’t be the case.  Mercy has no real substance as an independent character:  she exists purely as a series of contrasts – physical, social, political – to Lucy.  This is a pity because Kate Mara is the more emotionally alert and flexible of the two leads.  Ellen Page’s acting is as preconceived and monotonous as it was in Freeheld (2015).  Page was enjoyable as the title character in Juno (2007), her deserved breakthrough role, but she has turned into one of those performers who wears a fixed abandon-all-hope look that’s meant to demonstrate the moral seriousness of what she’s doing on screen.  At thirty-one, she is now remarkable to watch only in the sense that she’s physically convincing as women much younger than herself (Lucy is meant to be twenty-two).  Very occasionally in My Days of Mercy, Ellen Page’s face and intonations bring to mind the young Jane Fonda but this really makes matters worse.  As soon as you note the slight resemblance, you realise the expressive gulf between them.

    22 March 2018

    [1] To be more precise, ‘Capital punishment in Israel has only been imposed two times in the history of the state and is only to be handed out for crimes committed during war time, such as genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, crimes against the Jewish people, treason and certain crimes under military law’ (Wikipedia).

  • Hour of the Wolf

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Vargtimmen

    Ingmar Bergman (1968)

    Not for the first time, Bergman opens with devices that place himself and his audience at a remove from the film to come.  Text explains that Johan Borg, an artist, went missing, some years ago, from his home on Baltrum, one of the Frisian Islands; that Borg’s wife ‘later left me his diary’; that a combination of diary entries and Alma’s account are the basis of the film.   On the soundtrack, accompanying the opening credits on the screen, are the noise of people talking and the racket of hammering and other objects in  movement – before a voice (Bergman’s?) commands quiet and ‘Take’.  The first part of the narrative proper consists of Liv Ullmann, as Alma, speaking to camera.  These distancing effects and pseudo-documentary touches aren’t, however, a taste of things to come.   Once Hour of the Wolf is underway, it seems to move inside the mind of Johan Borg (Max von Sydow) and the viewer is no more able than Borg is to escape the flow of often fantastic and nightmarish images.  (Unless s/he walks out, as one person did at the BFI screening I attended.)  The various settings – the interior of Johan and Alma’s cottage, a castle, a forest, the sea – become psychological as well as physical realities.  One of the film’s most memorable shots is of the small boat that has brought the couple to Baltrum moving back out to sea and out of view.  From the point at which the boat drifts away, Johan Borg is unmoored from the quotidian world.

    Hour of the Wolf follows immediately after Persona in the chronological sequence of Bergman’s features.  (The title refers to the nocturnal hour at which, according to the insomniac Johan, most births and deaths occur.)  As in the preceding film, Bergman and Sven Nykvist create many compelling (black and white) images; Nykvist’s lighting of people’s faces is masterly.  The success of the piece depends, however, on submission to its visual flair and momentum.  Interpreting the images makes them less exciting because the themes they express and some of the details are too familiar.  There are recollected childhood traumas and a battle between the protagonist’s child and adult selves:  in a dream sequence, the man Johan kills the child (Mikael Rundqvist) inside him.  The baron (Erland Josephson) and his wife (Gertrud Fridh) invite the Borgs to a party at their castle on the island:  the other guests include leering ‘cannibals’ (Johan’s word), who mock and threaten the artist.  While the pregnant Alma is determinedly loyal to her husband, he remains obsessed by a former mistress Veronica Vogler (Ingrid Thulin), whose portrait that Johan painted hangs on a bedroom wall at the castle, and who is a guest at a subsequent party there.  The sinister Lindhorst (Georg Rydeberg) presides over a puppet show and later makes up Johan’s face and dresses him for a performance – making love to Veronica.  Johan looks up from doing so to see a derisively laughing audience of other guests enjoying the action.

    Max von Sydow, with his hair darker than usual and backcombed to give the impression of a more receding hairline, calls Bergman to mind.  Of course it’s interesting to watch von Sydow in what isn’t an obvious role for him though you can’t help feeling he’s better suited to playing an individual than an archetype.  Her opening interview is a shade too ‘acted’ but Liv Ullmann goes on to give the strongest performance in the film, as Alma tenaciously tries to keep a hold on reality as well as faith with her husband on his surreal, paranoid psychic odyssey.  The self-contained, black-clad figure of Erland Josephson registers:  he’s just as discomfiting in an unobtrusive movement like walking away from camera with his hands folded neatly behind his back as in the baron’s supernatural stroll across the ceiling.  Similarly, the cadaverous Naima Wifstrand (who died a few months after the film was released) is extraordinary to behold even before the scene in which her ‘Old Woman with a Hat’ removes not just her bonnet but the whole of her face.  The dissonant music by the modernist composer Lars Johan Werle expresses rather obviously Johan’s disturbed, unstable mind.

    17 March 2018

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